Workshop brief

Building on work being developed by communities in New York and Amsterdam this workshop in Barcelona will aim to deploy an urban sensor network in Barcelona in just three days using Pachube (now Xively), a realtime data infrastructure and global community for the 'Internet of Things'. We create and recreate our cities with every step we take, every conversation we have, every nod to a neighbor, every space we inhabit, every structure we erect, every transaction we make. Given its potential involvement in every area of our lives, the so-called 'Internet of Things' in an urban context offers the possibility of citizen-driven sense-making about the ways we can, could and should live in our cities.

Open data is currently popular in metropolises across the world, yet it's the process of measuring itself that concerns us in this workshop. Simply opening up data can itself be considered a control structure – a means of representing action without doing anything at all, while continuing to justify mass invasions of privacy, invasions into data produced by and belonging to citizens. The creating and crafting of data is important to consider because we use data to inform and take action upon our environments. This directly impacts others who share our spaces and our globally connected cities. So the real question is not just about making data public, but about how, why and where the public make data.How do all of us, as citizens, contribute to the data collection process? How do we learn from, understand and decide how to act upon our environments through the data we create or craft?